Britney Spears Delivers a Song for Your Next Night Out with “Clumsy”

We are about two weeks away from the arrival of Britney Spears’s ninth album, Glory, which will feature 17 (!) songs from the pop star (man, we really wish Spears had titled the album after the mantra she posted on Instagram this week: “The feeling when you don’t even know what the f--- you’re feeling.”).

In advance of the release, Spears has now released three separate songs from the EP, and they’re all pretty different in vibe.

Lead single “Make Me (Ooh)” was a simmering, understated (for a Britney lead single) track, featuring a verse from rapper G-Eazy. The song itself (which is holding up quite well, weeks after its release) was somewhat overshadowed by the semi-controversy over its music video (an initial video—shot by David LaChapelle—was apparently scrapped for a more straight-forward new cut, to the disappointment of many passionate Spears fans).

The second song Spears shared, “Private Show,” is a zany, slinky (almost country-tinged?) track, in which Spears coos about spinning and twerking “it,” closing out the proceedings by mentioning her “apple pie.” It’s weird and fun, and, if a tad confounding, it has the feel of a pretty excellent karaoke song.

And now we have a third track delivered onto us: it’s called “Clumsy,” and it was co-written by Spears and Talay Riley. Of the three, this is the most straight-forward “club” track. “Call me a fool, call me insane” Spears sings (a classic Spears lyrical motif), setting the tenor early on. This is the sort of song where the bridge is based around the lyric “Bangin’ all over this bedroom,” and the centerpiece of which is the beat drop in the chorus (that drop is proceeded with Spears squealing the word “oops,” which would seem to be a reference to one of her earliest, biggest hits).

Ultimately, while not likely to be featured on her next greatest-hits album, the song is innocuous and propulsive and a nice counterpart to the previous two releases. And, it should be noted, as she does on “Make Me” and “Private Show,” Spears sounds confident and assured on it, more than she has in some time. She sounds carefree, trying new things with her voice, as if she is just having fun, in a way that makes us very, very eager for the full set of songs coming our way on August 26.